Dave Matthews Breaks Down His Most Iconic Tracks

What would I hope my musical legacy is?

I hope that the people that I love remember

that I wasn't so much of a dick.

For the most part.

[upbeat music]

♪ He wakes up in the morning ♪

♪ Does his teeth bite to eat and he's rolling ♪

Ants Marching was pretty early on

maybe the most recognizable of our earlier tunes.

I met a lot of the guys when I was bartending.

So I met Carter, I think,

probably at the bar where I was working.

Millers prior became friendly with LeRoi.

There, he played there quite a bit straight

ahead jazz stuff.

And I think I knew Stefan from that period too.

I wrote four songs

and we all said we decided we'd get together

and the idea was maybe we'd make some recordings

or something, but because we only had a limited repertoire,

we exploited the guys who could play jazz.

There was a lot more improvisation

when you only had a few songs.

So we slowly added more and more to that

in songs like Ants Marching.

By the time we went into the studio,

I guess we'd probably been playing together

for about three years or so

and we had quite a big audience.

And whether or not we were, what we were doing was in style.

There was an eagerness for us to get into the studio

but we didn't know who to go in with, you know?

'Cause a lot of producers, you know,

at that time would be like,

You know, this is how you do,

this is how you make a rock record

or this is how you make a pop record.

But we were like, Well, we already have something

that's dragging all these people out to come and see.

We have this energy that's really different.

So I think one of the reasons we chose Steve Lillywhite

for those early sessions was

when he spoke to us about recording us.

He's like, I don't wanna change anything.

He said, I just wanna get what you do on stage.

He was genuine about it.

And he had this humility about

the way he said that is that he didn't know

how he was gonna do it, but he said it.

He knew that it had to be possible.

'Cause there's microphones and there's tapes

and so, what we ended up doing was, you know,

really just playing more and more and more.

And it really was his idea.

It was like once you had an arrangement

that you were gonna put down,

he just said, Just keep playing it and playing it.

And we really did until it started getting worse.

And then that was sort of the one he said,

That would be the take.

We started Ants Marching with just a straight snare hit.

[upbeat music]

And he just remembers hearing this.

[imitating drum hits]

I think it was like 20 snare hits.

He was like, This is insane.

And he said, Whatever happens next, it better be good.

Because this is pissing me off.

♪ Satellite headlines read ♪

♪ Someone's secrets you've seen ♪

Satellite was like a challenging lick.

I like to watch like Robert Fripp and how he played

but he has got this crazy way of playing.

It's like this thing, his hands are all spread out

and he gets all this coverage, which is unnecessary

if your guitar's tuned to, you know,

like traditionally. It made me like, just mess around

with that feeling of being spread out.

And then also, another friend of mine had said,

Why do rock bands always do everything in A and E?

And you know, C, why don't they ever do anything

like in A Flat or, you know, E Flat?

I was like, Well, 'cause, you know,

'cause all the cords are down there, you know?

And so, that made me think,

Well, if I'm doing this weird spread out thing,

I can find a pattern that works

that looks kinda like Robert Fripp,

but is unnecessary, and is A flat, you know?

[mellow guitar music]

So the way I first learned to play it

and sing at the same time, it was sort of like an exercise.

I would just play it over and over again

and I would try and talk while I was doing it

and I'd make up silly lyrics to it.

It taught me that you can separate my voice from my guitar.

Like one could be the marching orders

and the other one could be singing and dancing,

flying around those structure a little bit more.

[Interviewer] That song is rumored to be about your father

who passed away when you were young.

Is there any truth to that?

Maybe. I don't always know why I start something

and usually really, if I'm right, you know,

whew, lyrics are not easy.

Some people are really good at it, but the songs

that I'm unapologetic about are the ones that come quickly.

Then they don't have time to get dragged

through the gravel or through the dirt.

And then I don't think too clinically about them

but I imagine that a therapist might look at Satellite

and say,

That's about death

or about loss or about accepting that it is loss.

And so then, if you look at my life, you'd say,

Well, his dad died. But then no, but my dog died too.

So, could be about my dog.

♪ You come crash into me crash into me ♪

Crash is odd because it was a love song

and I've dribbled on about what it was about,

but it was very much at the beginning of the partnership

I'm still in.

And that's where it came from.

There's always a funny regret that I have

'cause there's this throwaway line

that while we're recording,

that I jokingly at the end of the song,

about the skirt that I threw in there

as in one take as a joke.

♪ Hike up your skirt a little more ♪

♪ And show your world to me ♪

The rest of it is sort of a, for me,

was always a little bit lighter,

but it made the whole thing more about sex

than maybe I wanted to admit it was.

But then, if I look at the song, for me,

it's a pretty sexy song.

It's hard for me to sing it now

that I'm in the second half.

It's like I was, that's what I like to call it, of my time.

This is a song of a 26 year old or 25 year old.

Now I'm a 56 year old.

So then changes what you wanna sing about.

I mean, I still wanna sing about it, but I'm like,

Easy, pal.

Reign it in.

I throw my back out too often to sing that song.

♪ Who's got their claws in you my friend ♪

♪ Into your heart ♪

I was really grateful

because that made me look at it a little differently.

The term autonomy of art.

I always like that idea that once you finish something,

if you put it in the world, it's no longer yours.

And what it mean, what you intended doesn't matter anymore.

And I like that idea 'cause then it also takes

some of the responsibility off of me

but could mean a mountain to somebody else.

And I might have just intended a molehill, you know.

♪ You come crash into me ♪

♪ Yeah ♪

♪ Yeah yeah yeah ♪

I have no idea what number it was.

It could have been 41.

And that's a nice way to think about it.

But I also think

that I had no idea what the fuck I was talking about

because I've had people talk to me about that song

and how much it means to them.

And I'm like, Well, maybe you can sit down

and explain it all to me.

There's some good lines in that

and it's definitely got some stuff to it

and I like playing that song, but also,

because I don't know what the hell,

whoever wrote it is talking about.

So I can't talk to you about the lyrics too much.

It's, you know,

there's some loneliness in there, there's some loss,

some where have all the good times gone kind of feel to it.

A little bit of that too.

But I don't know. I don't know.

It seems pretty obtuse to me.

What is it about? A goat or World War III?

I don't know which one

but it's clearly about one of the two.

♪ Don't drink the water here ♪

With friends of mine, people close to me say,

What do you think the best song you ever wrote is?

And I, that's the first one.

Every time. I have nothing to apologize for that.

It's like, I was as clear as I could be.

You know, why am I mad at the history of like,

of North America?

The thing I'm mad about is all of the knowledge

and all of the culture and all of the perspective

that we erased for greed and

but for all generations to come,

to steal the future away from our children,

the idea of conquering people is deeply misguided,

arrogant, and stupid.

I realized that the best way

for me to say that was to be the villain.

And that's the part that I'd like so much

about that song is like being the hunter.

You know, where the skulls I've gotta crush

because this is all mine.

And then, of course, the reflection is, sort of looking back

that don't drink the water part is turning around

and facing what you've done.

But we still do it. That's what we do.

♪ I have no time to justify to you ♪

♪ Fool you're blind move aside for me ♪

I think what's interesting in America is in the US

and we've told this oversimplified story

that the racism of America primarily existed in the South.

But the truth is, when you look at our history

and the the racism was everywhere, here in Seattle,

no one could, that wasn't white, could live

in this neighborhood 60 years ago, less than that probably.

And, of course, it was enormously central to the south.

But then when I talk to people in Virginia or Louisiana,

and you talk to people about race and race issues,

you might find the most overtly secessionist or whatever.

But you also find, in my opinion,

the most aggressively progressive people in the country

down there is the front line.

So that's where you find the people

that have changed the country.

'Cause that's so much of where it happened.

Of course, it happened everywhere,

but it really happened there.

A lot of the hopes of that we have for resolving

the problems in this country will be found in the southeast.

I still think.

♪ The space between the tears we cry ♪

I loved the process of making that record.

It was different for all of us as well.

And I think the resulting record was good.

I was, you know, a lot of people said,

It doesn't sound like you, like your other records.

But then again, that doesn't bother me

because it's not the same bit of music.

Then once we started playing a lot of those songs live,

I remember talking to Glen about it 'cause he came to a show

and after hearing how he played the songs

after we've been playing them for a year, heard him saying,

Man, I wish we could go back in

and make that record again.

Something changes, you know,

when something sort of gets sewn

into your being a little bit.

I think it's an incredibly beautiful record and I like that

it sounds different and it deserves to sound different.

♪ Every day ♪

♪ Pay no mind to taunts or advances ♪

That song is, unintentionally,

had a really beautiful resonance when it first, you know,

after 9/11, it was a different thing

and people were looking at that in a different way.

You know, I can remember going into New York

like a week after 9/11, I remember a plane flew

over the city where we were all standing

outside smoking cigarettes.

Everyone stopped.

It's like all the truckers and everyone.

Everyone was just standing

and looking up 'cause, you know, no one,

it was the first planes that had flown over the city.

It was such a creepy, weird, desperate, sad time.

I will say that on that record

that there was a song we still played.

I love that song called When the World Ends.

When the World Ends is supposed to be released as a single

but they wouldn't let it

'cause it's described sort of this crumbling city.

And then, it was sort of banned from the radio

which was funny 'cause, you know,

if I was gonna have a song banned,

it's funny that it was a cheesy love song

but I don't mind the irony.

♪ So stumbling through her memory ♪

♪ Staring out onto Grey Street ♪

That song seems uplifting.

But it's just, you know,

the noise of the traffic, it's noisy and boisterous,

but it's about somebody who lives, you know, who's alone.

That's even more so now when you look at

how lonely people are, when we're also connected

and it's kind of fun to look in a traffic jam,

to look at all these different cars

or all these different windows

where novels of stories are happening

in every single one of those or in every house.

And that happens 8 billion times over.

But it's incredible how isolated we are

when there's so many of us here.

And so, that song's just about even when people are trying

to sort of reach into us and help us out that

the true loneliness that we all exist in is inescapable.

If we obsess on ourselves.

♪ Oh Little Billy's got a gun ♪

♪ Little Billy's having fun ♪

The song's not directly about my political views on guns

'cause it's not really political,

it's just. Are you insane or are you not insane?

I know I have a lot of friends

who have guns and love their guns.

I don't have a gun. I never had a gun.

I mean, I had a pelican, I think, a BB gun.

But that song is just about my reaction

to how insane the news is.

This bizarre idea that keeps coming up.

It's like, Let's not make it political

just 'cause another 10 people got mowed down.

Let's not make, it's like,

I don't give a fuck about the politics.

I don't give a fuck.

I'm just saying, I don't want people to get shot

for going to school, or for going to the office,

or for going to university, or for going, you know,

going to the mall.

And so, the song is simply that.

It's like I, you know, I'm just afraid.

I'm afraid, I'm not trying to choose sides here

but it seems like if we make the those issues,

issues like guns, political issues,

that's a really good way to not deal with real issues.

♪ Someday we're all gonna leave here ♪

♪ Maybe sooner than we wanted ♪

I think Something to Tell My Baby is self-explanatory.

I'm really grateful.

Came quick.

It was a fast song, boom.

This is what it is.

And if you listen to that song,

I think, what it is is clear

about

death and about family.

What would I hope my musical legacy is?

You know, things come and go quickly nowadays, you know?

So, I hope it casts a pretty shadow

but I don't know how long it'll last.

You know?

I hope that the people that I love

remember that I wasn't so much of a dick.

For the most part.